Kimberly from Credit is cool on camera

At 10 o’clock on Tuesday morning, about 50 employees at the offices of TaylorMade Golf in Carlsbad gathered around a TV to watch one of their own make out like a bandit.

They saw the credit department’s Kimberly Wagenman -- who commutes every day from her home in Temecula -- hop, hug, yell, play to the audience, and say hi to her mom back home in Gerber, Calif. -- population 500.

Some might say she was even a little wacky, but isn’t that what one is supposed to be on “The Price Is Right?”

They also saw her win a car, a pickup, an all-expenses-paid trip, in a limo, no less, to Sequoia National Park, and a slew of video games, all in about 15 minutes of air time. The total value for all that stuff is more than $47,000.

Shoot, if it were me standing up there, I’d be wacky, too.

But I’ll give Kimberly credit. She was way cooler than Harry the retired, portly petty officer from Ventura who nearly jumped out of his shoes at the thought of bidding on a new sailboat.

And she was much more in control than the bouncy nurse from Virginia, who couldn’t pronounce the word “defibrillator” and was way off on guessing the price of a pound of coffee.

Perhaps the only chink in Kimberly’s performance came at the end, when I could have sworn that gulpish look on her face seemed to say, “Where am I gonna put all this stuff?”

“I was pretty excited,” Kimberly said the other day. “I’ve never really won anything. I was very lucky.”

Kimberly said she’s not crazy about game shows, but she has a friend in Los Angeles who is. He got tickets to the show and that’s how she and her roommate, Cindy Cappello, who also works at TaylorMade, wound up on “The Price Is Right” set in Studio City. Needless to say, Kimberly was floored when the show’s producer chose her to “Come on down!”

There are certain ironies to her appearance.

For one, she is only 25 years old and also a student at the University of Redlands. “The Price Is Right” has been around since 1956 and the newer version, with all the glitz and various games, has been on the air for 41 years.

Also, she once was a checker at a grocery store so she felt very confident if her success depended on pricing foods.

“Instead I had games where I had to guess the price of cars,” she said.

As for those vehicles -- a Ford Mustang and a Toyota Tacoma -- she really doesn’t need them. Kimberly just bought a Kia Optima a few months ago and is very happy with it.

“I’ll give the Mustang to my mom and sell the truck to a Toyota dealership,” she said. “That’s what normally happens. The (five-day) trip to Sequoia will probably be this fall.”

Then she confided something that to me seemed like the hardest part of this whole game show adventure. Much harder than pricing a coffee maker or deciding to spin again on some silly wheel.